I still remember my first night at Antaiji: Although the temple is
located remotely in the mountains, I heard music constantly playing on the
other side of the valley. Even in the city it was never so noisy. I
remember that during the first night I listened to gospel music, voices
shouting "halleluya!" all night long. Maybe there is a chapel on the top
of the mountain, I thought. All the noise during the night might have been
one of the reasons why everybody was sleeping during the zazen hours the
next day. Or not really everybody was sleeping all of the time, but at
least three or four out of the five Japanese monks would always be
sleeping. To me this seemed very disappointing, having come all the way
from Germany to experience "real Zen" here. How can they possibly be
sleeping during zazen? In Europe, it is usual that a sesshin is attended
by up to two or three hundred people, but you will rarely find anyone
sleeping. So, was it a mistake that I had come to Antaiji? Maybe I should
have continued to practice in some dojo in Germany?

Thinking like
this, I had already forgotten the teaching that I had received the
afternoon before from my teacher to be, the former abbot Miyaura Shinyu
Roshi. It turned out to be one of the most important teachings that he
would give me during his life time:"You create Antaiji! It is not that
Antaiji does already exist and you just join in. Antaiji is not more or
less than the place you make it."I guess this is the first thing that
he told everyone who came to Antaiji. You create Antaiji. And I was
already complaing about what I found. But what I found was just the
Antaiji I created - or rather the flip-side of all those lofty ideas I had
had in my head: Of an incredibly enlightened teacher and accomplished
monks who would help me with my practice and solve all the problems in
life for me. It took me quite some time to really see that it is me who
creates all those problems, who creates Antaiji when it is good as well as
when it is bad, who creates all the love and hate, all the war and peace
in the world. The question was not how my neighbor could possibly sleep
during zazen, but rather how I could possibly allow myself to be bothered
by it. Wasn't it rather time to take care of my own practice
first?

After the sesshin was over I found out where all the noise
during the nights (it was incredibly quiet during the day) had come from:
The rice had just been harvested and was drying at the far side of a
former baseball ground, that the monks had build when there were still
enough of them to enjoy the game. Wild boars were coming down from the
mountain every night to help themselves to the newly harvested rice, and a
full-blast radio posted there was supposed to scare them away. The radio
did not really scare away the boars, but it helped to keep us awake during
the nights anyway.

I realized there were other reasons for the
monks being tired during zazen. The two sesshin each month consist of
three and five days respectively of zazen starting at four in the morning
and continuing all day until nine at night, with no interruptions except
for the meals. Naturally, I had thought, these two sesshin are what the
practice at Antaiji is centered around. How could anything be more severe
than those marathon-sesshins? I was to learn soon after the sesshin was
over: Even after the typhoon that had washed the road away had passed,
heavy rain continued to fall for about four weeks that year. It washed
away not only the road, but also a four acre rice field, unrooted hundreds
of trees and filled the water dam, from which Antaiji gets its drinking
water, completely with dirt, rocks and trees. Water from the tap in Kyoto
does not taste good - as is the case in most Japanese cities. So I was
surprised on arriving in Antaiji, that the water here had an even more
distinct taste, and that it was flowing quite thickly out of the tap.
Above all, it was brown. When I saw the dam after sesshin, I knew the
reason: What I had thought was water had been the mud that had been washed
into the dam. Our task during the next three days was to clear all of that
mud, dirt, rocks and trees out of the dam. The monks were eager to have
clean water flowing out of the tap again, and although it was raining
heavy still, samu continued at a high pace until well after dark. Sesshin
had been painful on the legs, but this was hell. After three days of samu,
we had a "free day". I think they were called "free days" because we had
no zazen on those days. Instead we would walk down the four kilometers
which before used to be a road, then ride bycicles to the fifteen
kilometer away town Hamasaka to fetch the mail, buy soy sauce and oil for
the kitchen, and gasoline for the truck and tractor and the sawing
machines. All this had to be carried back in 20 liter cans, two of which
each of us would carry on our backs. After the "free day", samu would
continue: Fallen trees had to be cut and carried into the barn, where they
would be chopped to yield fire in the kitchen or heat the bath. A
provisiory walk path had to be built down the mountain. The rice had to be
threshed. Work in the vegetable garden was regarded a past time. Even on
days with heavy rain, work inside was unknown. And the sesshins in fact
turned out to be our only holidays.